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The Nuremberg Trials:
Newspaper Accounts

Telford Taylor, key U.S. prosecutor at Nazi war trials,
dies

by The Associated PressMay 24, 1998

NEW YORK - Telford Taylor, who prosecuted Nazi war criminals
at Nuremberg and helped lay the foundation for the principle that governments
must be held accountable for mistreating their citizens, died yesterday.
He was 90.

Mr. Taylor, who also was a law professor, author and activist,
suffered a series of strokes earlier this month, according to a friend,
Jonathan Bush, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
N.J. Mr. Taylor died in New York.

At the close of World War II, the victorious Allies -
the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France - captured Hermann
Goering and 20 other leading Nazis and set up the tribunal in the Palace
of Justice at Nuremberg in southern Germany. It was Soviet dictator Josef
Stalin, Mr. Taylor recalled, who demanded that the Nazi leaders be tried
rather than executed outright, as some Allied leaders wanted.

Prosecutors accused them of shattering civilized standards
by organizing or abetting atrocities and laying waste to Europe.

The 21 captured Nazis were put on trial Nov. 20, 1945,
along with Hitler deputy Martin Bormann, who couldn't be found and was
tried in absentia. Nineteen were convicted in the 10-month trial. Twelve
were sentenced to death; of them, Goering committed suicide, 10 others
were hanged in October 1946, and Bormann was never found. The seven others
got prison sentences.

Mr. Taylor was a top assistant at the trial. Promoted
to brigadier general, Mr. Taylor then became chief prosecutor when nearly
200 more Nazis - death squad members, industrialists and others - were
tried in a dozen subsequent trials at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949.
Of them, about 150 were convicted.

"The crimes of these men were not committed in rage, nor
under the stress of sudden temptation," Mr. Taylor said in 1947 at the
opening of one of the trials of German war industrialists. "One does not
build a stupendous war machine in a fit of passion, nor an Auschwitz slave
factory during a passing spasm of brutality."

At a trial of doctors and scientists accused of brutal
medical experiments, Mr. Taylor said the court had the obligation to "set
forth with conspicuous clarity the ideas and motives which moved these
defendants to treat their fellow men as less than beasts."

Mr. Taylor described his experiences in his 1992 book,
"The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir."

The trials proceeded despite differing opinions among
the Allies about how to proceed, the absence of legal precedents for much
of what they were doing, and the question of whether it was really right
for the victors in the war to try the losers.

Mr. Taylor concluded that despite the difficulties, the
trials were a success, but suggested that any future war-crimes trial must
look at the actions of the winners as well as the losers. "The laws of
war are not a one-way street," he said.

Wrote The Nation magazine in 1995: "The human rights movement
owes much of its legal foundation to the work of Gen. Telford Taylor .
. . Nuremberg gave legitimacy to the concept that the world had something
to say about how governments treat their own citizens. In 1950 the United
Nations codified Nuremberg's most important statements into seven Nuremberg
Principles, which have since been adopted by the legal systems of almost
every major nation."

During the 1950s, Mr. Taylor, back in civilian life, spoke
out against Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist activities and defended
some of those targeted by him. His book "Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional
Investigations," criticized McCarthy's tactics.

He later wrote an anti-Vietnam War book, "Nuremberg and
Vietnam: An American Tragedy," and worked to help Jews who were imprisoned
in the Soviet Union.

He even was a special master for the courts in a case
involving the National Basketball Association's labor agreement.

Mr. Taylor also was a professor emeritus at Columbia University
School of Law and a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale law schools.

Mr. Taylor was born in 1908 in Schenectady, N.Y. He graduated
from Harvard Law School in 1932.